The only things that are old are the roads and we’re still on them.
— Matraca
“We’ll be gone for a while.” Describing the coming weeks to his young son, Jorge (Jorge Machado) leans close, his long hair hanging loose. The fiver-year-old boy, Natan (Natan Machado Palombini), follows him onto a bus that takes them to a distant shore. From here, their walk on the beach appears in tracking long shot, the wheels of Natan’s backpack scraping on the sand.
The shot is lovely and patient, attentive to the synced movements of father and son. Their time together forms the focus of Alamar (To the Sea), screening at Film Forum until 20 July. The camera follows them to Banco Chinchorro, the largest coral reef in Mexico, source and site of Jorge’s Mayan heritage. Here they will fish, cook, explore the beach and jungle around them, and come to know one another, encouraged and instructed by an older fisherman, Matraca (Nestor Marin). The images throughout suggest this all-male family’s evolving rhythms, their effects on each other and their coming to intimacy.
This father-son intimacy is based on Natan and Jorge’s real-life relationship, a doubling that complicates how you might see Alamar. Neither traditional documentary nor fiction, it’s a blending that expands both and all. Director-cinematographer-editor Pedro González-Rubio has come up with a plot and set up some frankly breathtaking shot compositions — the camera perched over the boat’s prow as it cuts brilliantly clear water, viewing a silhouetted Natan through a perfectly framing doorway, and pushed in close as Jorge holds his boy, seasick during his first boat outing. But as the subjects “play themselves,” so simply and so seemingly authentic, the film isn’t quite what it looks like.
González-Rubio puts it this way: “The story is fiction but based on reality.” As the movie follows Natan, Jorge, and Matraca’s negotiations of work and domesticity, it recalls Araya (1959), another paean to elements and images, shaped as a reflection on labor and family. But where Margot Benacerraf’s film looked at a small array of family and community members, Alamar is determinedly focused on fathers and sons.
The seeming reason is established in a prologue, a series of still photos under narration shows how Jorge met Natan’s mother, Roberta (Roberta Palombini). “The time we were together,” she says, “It was a magical time.” They smile on the beach, she appears pregnant in the surf, as she imagines, “It’s like we were destined to each other, you know, so that this specific boy would be born.”
This miracle notwithstanding, the couple’s relationship collapsed, she goes on without details. She lives in Rome, her son’s father “in the middle of the jungle at the sea, in the middle of nowhere. I couldn’t live here, I would die in a place like this.” And so she doesn’t. Instead, she and Natan now live in the city, and he spends vacations with his dad. During this visit, he learns to do without running water or television, coming to appreciate the beauties of the land and sea, including an egret they call Blanquita, who walks into their palafitte (a wooden home on stilts in the water) in order to be handfed treats and perch tentatively on Jorge’s hand — much to the child’s delight.
It is this sense of delight and wonder that the movie conveys most effectively. Though Natan is initially unsure of how to handle himself on the boat, he’s soon eager to learn to fish with a line, to snorkel, and to scale the daily catch. Sometimes the film approximates Natan’s perspective, insinuating his discoveries, low or slow-moving or even tentative, as rain pounds the shack’s roof or he peeks through the netting of his hammock, swinging slightly. At other times, the image is bold and colorful, bursting and vivid like a tourist brochure, the local fishermen joking amongst themselves, as if posing. As Natan watches his dad, the camera does as well, panning up and out from Jorge’s outstretched arm to a blazing white sky, or tracking close to the ground behind legs, tanned and taut in the sand.
Such variety hints at the newness of the boy’s experience, but it also speaks to the care taken to construct the film. Jorge might live in a wonderland, magical and out of time. The film is a function of time and skill. Nearing the end off his stay, Natan draws what he has seen, stowing the paper in a bottle he then casts into the sea, to travel back to “Italy or Mexico.” As he works over his representation, he lists what he’s seen: the egret, a barracuda, and oh yes, the camera! For days and weeks, he and his father have been followed and framed, so their shared experience, felt differently, might be remembered later as he is remembering now.